It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn’t be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.

Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I’d still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn’t complain.

ITT: people hating on capitalism and its grip on technology.

It is mostly hype honestly

I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don’t think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what your noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can’t deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it’s further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.

I think that as I’ve gotten older I’ve become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you’re coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we’re never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.

It feels to me like you don’t hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.

If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you “having” to adapt to not “fall behind”, when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them…

Would you really mind progress that much?

The bicycle might have been a good place for us to stop.

I think you’d appreciate The Prisoner. One of the core themes of that show is the misuse of technology by the ruling class

What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.

This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.

This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.

The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.

I don’t have a problem with technology advancing. I have a problem with the goal of all this new shit just being to extract more money out of me while providing as minimal product as possible. An easy example being smartphones. The potential in functionality for them is insane but I can’t buy one today that doesn’t have less features than my 2016 model and I’m constantly fighting permissions bullshit any time I try to do anything fancy with it.

Technology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.

The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.

Your feelings are of course valid, that’s how you feel, and it’s a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.

All of the talk you hear about AI, it’s 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it’s not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it’s not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.

With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.

The problem isn’t necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuse

The future is tied to big companies and subscribing to thier services. I would love to get a smart watch for my health checks. I love the circle to search from anywhere on your phone screen (samasung phones). I would love to try those ray bans AR glasses. But I will almost never get to use them because that means signing my data away to make big companies bigger.

I’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.

What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.

I had that feeling at some point, and then I just stopped reading news about technology. No more news about the fancy new storage device, no news about exotic mobile displays etc. I just read about science stuff in general. It’s more delightful to read what astronomers have found on the moons on Saturn or what microbiologists have found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. I felt much better after adjusting my news diet.

You’re probably reading stuff that makes you tired. Try to identify what that is, and avoid that sort of material. For me, it was tech news.

BTW, if you have a tendency to get tired of this stuff, try to avoid conflict news. That would just make you sad, angry and anxious.